The Wormlips Scrapbook

Poor Mamma Ginna. She’s had another stroke. She can no longer walk and can barely talk, she’s frail and confused, and she hurts. I asked her daughter-in-law, who visits her each day in the hospital in West Virginia, to send her my love. All Mamma Ginna could do was smile. Looks like she may not make it till August when we’re flying back to visit her. She’s always saying to me, “I wish you lived closer.” Me too. She’s had a long life. Still, my heart hurts badly again at the idea of never seeing her again.

Speaking of heartbreak, at Spanish class last night a fellow estudiante, Yumi, did a report on a song called La Copa Rota. It’s the most wonderfully tortured song ever. Here’s my abbreviation of her excellent translation:

Drowning in jealousy
a Bohemian sits in the cantina,
hopeless and sad,
his nerves wrecked,
crying without relief
like a tormented crazy man
because that ungrateful woman left him.

One night, like a madman,
he bit the wineglass
and made a sharp edge that destroyed his lip.
And the blood that dripped
mixed in with the wine
and this cry shuddered
to all those in the bar:

Don’t worry, campañeros,
if I destroy my mouth.
Don’t worry that with the edge of this glass
I want to erase
the mark of the kiss
that the traitor gave me.

Waiter, serve me the broken glass.
Serve me so it destroys
this obsessive fever.
Waiter, serve me the broken glass.
I want to bleed drop by drop
the venom of her love.

It doesn’t get better than that. It made me want to run right home and start composing my own songs, full of despair and longing and blood. I think my first canción will ponder the eternal question: why have I never found my own true love, even though I’ve been sitting here in my living room for years just waiting for him?

Ayyiyi!
Mi corazon está congelado
en este enfierno de solitud sepulcral.
Mi sangre como pecina escarchada
No puede correr por mis venas estrangulares.
AY-yi-yiii…

Oooh, I’m liking it. “My heart is frozen in this hell of tomblike solitude. My blood like frosted sludge can’t run through my strangled veins.” Hey, I rock at this.

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Today has been Bake-a-Tape Day. I bought and tested two convection ovens and a fruit dryer. The former will go back to the store because they cook too hot, but the dehydrator seems to be doing the trick, albeit erratically. (I need to find one with a fan.) I successfully baked away the sticky shed syndrome from two of three tapes. (The third is still screeching and dragging, so it’s back in the cooker.)

I am so excited—I haven’t heard these programs for twenty-five years and thought I might never hear them again. And you know something? I was pretty funny back then. I never realized that till now.

You know something else? Listening to this stuff has begun to illuminate how essential it is that I get back to doing creative stuff for work. I spent today researching grants for the project I want to do. Sadly, all I found were brick walls.

Anyway, here’s a newly baked piece. It’s about personal ads, a fairly unaccepted social phenomenon at the time (around ‘83). Little did we know what lay around the corner with the vast and lucrative online dating industry. This program still cracks me up, and I can still quote from memory the poem that you’ll hear:

Whatever space is your location, what is important is communication..

(This was before four-tracks, so the mixes are a little funky.)

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Today I finished converting all my old programs that were on DAT. Then I dragged my heavy old Otari two-track from the basement and tried playing some old analog tapes on it, but of course it didn’t work. Most of my radio work is from the early 80s to early 90s when Scotch and Ampex were making that tape that went defective. So I’ve just ordered a toaster oven and will, with trepidation, attempt to start baking my old programs next week.

In the meantime, here’s something I found at the bottom of a box of five-inch reels. It’s the very first answering machine message I ever did, in about 1982. I got carried away producing it on my brand-new four-track reel-to-reel. Since I no longer have that machine it plays back funny, but you’ll get the idea. Just for fun.

I also found a recording I made of kids playing in the South African township of Guguletu. Should I put that up here too?

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